I agree mostly, #3 is the problem and that's what work needs to focus on. What puzzles me is the reasoning that users choose #2 because of that. Clearly the choice should be #1, or not?

With projects I meant trustworthy curation groups. In total there is a quite huge number of genuine curators here, which would be happy to spread more towards the tail.

I got into a lot of detail in my reply to azircon's question, and also mentioned the huge difference between #2 and #3 (your 1.) in the real environment. #2 benefits investors as a group over those who could've received the vote instead. It just doesn't hurt investors choosing #1.

A mixed scenario actually works well "if everybody did it" and #3 was solved. At least as long as the outgoing votes aren't mostly self-votes or votes for friends then (which seems to be the case for quite a few people voting on burnposts now).

And fully agree with the final note :D